The usual suspects stole the rains and are likely, yet again, to get away...

The piece questions failed El Nino forecasts and the fate of billions set aside for disaster preparedness. [File, Standard]

Let’s cut to the chase. We were scammed. There will be no El-Nino. Zilch. Why would I speak with such finality? Because we’ve been here before...

First off, folks at the Met swore by the gods of whatever hills they worship that fire and brimstone would befall those who ignored their warnings. A tsunami was on its way, they promised, gaining momentum by the day, and it was just a matter of time before it hit our shores. They even gave the day and time of the expected Armageddon. For good measure, they said, it’d be worse than what we experienced in 1997.

I responded by phoning nurseries near my inch of earth. I wanted to be sure the healthiest seedlings were assembled in readiness for the rains. And because I feared the roads would be washed away even sooner, I hauled the cargo to the farm as the last month closed.

When the first droplets landed, the seedlings were sunk into the ground. Then the skies turned blue. The biggest task has been keeping those seedlings alive. And I know we’re in this for the long haul because the tenor of those folks at the Met has changed. Their confidence has evaporated, like the rains.

It’s no longer about when and how much rainfall we should expect. Now they are speaking about the “probability” of any of that happening. When they speak that way, then you know they’re playing karata.

It’s an enduring lesson from my teens, when we roamed the city streets broke and hungry. Once, my cousin and I decided to use the fare home and place a bet on the karata run by street hustlers. Their tools of trade being a shuffle of cards and a piece of cardboard that served as a deck.

“Hii ni bureee, hiii ni bureee, hii ni pesaaa...” the man said, upturning each card at every shuffle. Applying the math of probability, that meant one had a 30 per cent chance of doubling their cash in a few shuffles of the cards.

We placed our bet of a few shillings. They were gobbled. The loss felt cathartic almost instantly when some dashing young man who wore white shoes and blue jeans and had a fresh crew cut emerged. He placed his bet using a clean Sh50 note. He lost.

The street hustlers, having smelt blood—I understand those crooks can smell money from a mile away— were encouraging. They told the young man he could “recover” his first loss if he placed another bet. He did. It was another clean Sh50 note that.

 This, too, disappeared in the same hole that the first note had gone in. The young man trembled. He had been urged to place the second bet to recover his first loss, he protested. He needed one bet back because he was headed to Thika, and now he had no fare... The hustlers paid him no heed. Next, they did what they do best. They disappeared.

Folks at the Met department aren’t too different from those street hustlers. After shouting from the rooftops about the prospects of a deluge that could pound our land for the next five months (and the first having gone past without more than a few droplets), they are talking gibberish.

They are warning about an “intertropical convergence zone,” whatever that means, which is swinging from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but has been somewhat halted by low pressure around the Indian Ocean.

In other words, they are saying there is “jam” around the Indian Ocean and they have no way of knowing what happens next. As happens when there is a traffic jam on our roads, some folks will arrive late, others will head back; yet others will party wherever they are and post pictures on their social media.

Meanwhile, you know what happens to the billions of shillings allocated for El-Nino disaster preparedness. That will go down the same hole that took the two crisp-clean Sh50 notes from that Thika-bound youth of yore.